YouTube rolling out new video player

YouTube has started to roll out a completely new video player on its website. The player's been popping up here and there for a fortnight or so, but it looks like the testing has been a success and it's been approved for wider release.

The red progress bar has been made transparent and now sits below the video without borders, with the play/pause button, volume slider (which is now horizontal rather than vertical), resolution changer and fullscreen button sitting below that. No button for captions or annotations will be shown if there aren't any captions or annotations available.

More interestingly, YouTube's now letting you have a peek under the hood at performance information. Right-clicking the video gives you the option to "show video info", listing size, bit rate, fps, transfer bandwidth and a few other performance statistics. Another option lets you copy debug info onto your clipboard, for pasting into a support email.

The new player doesn't work with videos with ads on, or with embedded videos on other sites yet, but YouTube plans to roll that out within a few weeks.